What is in a accent I have spoken with a real Southern Draw when I lived in Florida as a child. When I moved to North Dakota for awhile I sounded different for sure.
Some people change their accents if they live in another place a couple of years, some don't. Some Swedes forget many Swedish words when living in the US for many years and rarely speaking Swedish, while others speak perfectly Swedish after decades abroad.
I have lived all over Texas and, believe it or not, there are a number of different sounding Texas accents, all of which I have conglomerated. I also lived in Tennessee and now Indiana. All have different accents and common word usages vary, also. My problem is that I'm an echoer. I mimic everything I hear and accents settle in my speech fairly quickly, as long as I'm still playing the "Game" of socializing, but when I relax and return to my own comfort zone
Ah'm pure ole west Texas.
Once my wife and her brother were trying to do me a favor, by getting me a job with someone they knew. They got him on the phone and were trying to get me to talk to him, right then. No one knew how incredibly difficult it is for me to talk on the telephone, in those days, except me (Phoning with Sensory integration dysfunction = hear the sound + create a mental pictorial representation + try to find similarities to other pictorials in memory + try to extract some meaning + identify possible related responses + choose a response + create some pictorial avenue of dialog patterns to present to my speech centers + translate it to working spoken words.) It all happens in a flash if I'm sharp and "On It", but when I'm fatigued or forced into an uncomfortable situation, like being pushed to talk on the phone, I resort to a default accent. I spoke in a Texas drawl and they all thought I had deliberately spoken like an asshole hick in order to NOT get the job. I didn't even know I had changed my speech patterns. I just wanted to go talk, in person, to the boss guy to get the job, that way, and skip the whole phoning part.
I have mellowed my default accent to some degree and now, noboby seems to be able to tell where I'm from, because my accent is so mixed up.
Pyraxis,
Congrats on the new job! I hope your accent doesn't fuck you over.